American women afield : writings by pioneering women naturalists / edited by Marcia Myers Bonta. [electronic resource]

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bonta, Marcia, 1940-

Series:

Louise Lindsey Merrick natural environment series ; no. 20

Louise Lindsey Merrick natural environment series American women afield

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Natural history--United States.

Natural history.

Women naturalists--United States--Biography.

Women naturalists.

Naturalists--United States--Biography.

Naturalists.

Natural history--Biography--United States.

Women naturalists--Biography--United States.

Naturalists--United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvi, 248 p. ) ill. ;

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

College Station : Texas A&M University, c1995.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Armed with hand lenses and opera glasses, traveling on foot, by buggy, or model T, they explored thousands of miles of deserts, forests, beaches, and jungles. They were pioneering women naturalists who observed, studied, and experimented, then returned to write up their findings. What resulted were exquisitely written and scientifically accurate accounts of their explorations into natural science - a field long dominated by men.

Marcia Myers Bonta has collected the most charming and sensitive writings of twenty-five women naturalists of the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries and supplemented them with well-researched biographical profiles. From Susan Fenimore Cooper's early warnings about the profligate use of natural resources to Mary Treat's tenacious defense of her scientific discoveries, from Alice Eastwood's defiance of convention to Caroline Dormon's, Lucy Braun's, and Rachel Carson's impassioned pleas to save the earth, American Women Afield catalogs the determination and devotion of these early scientists and acknowledges their invaluable contributions to ornithology, entomology, botany, agrostology, and ecology.

Contents:

Susan Fenimore Cooper: Summer

Graceanna Lewis: Birds and their friends

Mary Treat: Plants that eat animals

Martha Maxwell: From on the plains and among the peaks

Annie Trumbull Slosson: Experiences of a collector collecting on Biscayne Bay, part II

Katharine Dooris Sharp: The woman botanist

Althea Sherman: The home life of the chimney swift, Down with the house wren boxes

Elizabeth Gifford Peckham: Communal life, Ammophila and her caterpillars

Alice Eastwood: Letter: May 7, 1906 in Portu Bodega

Anna Botsford Comstock: a dweller in tents.

Cordelia Stanwood: The hermit thrush: the voice of the northern woods

Agnes Chase: Eastern Brazil through an agrostologist's spectacles

Ynes Mexia: Camping on the equator

Mary Sophie Young: Mary S. Young's Journal of Botanical explorations in Trans-Pecos, Texas, August-September, 1914

Edith Clements: Ecology and World War I

Edith Patch: Marooned in a potato field

Ann Haven Morgan: Fresh-water sponges in winter

Margaret Morse Nice: The Awakening

Nellie Harris Rau: Behavior of pompilid wasps.

Amelia Laskey: Watching a Carolina Wren's nest

Caroline Dormon: Camping in the Kisatchie Wold

E. Lucy Braun: the forest of Lynn Fork of leatherwood

Ruth Harris Thomas: Crip, come home

Rachel Carson: Sea pansies, Basket starfish, The other road.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-248).

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

ISBN:

0-585-17394-X